Have We Learned Anything?

Abstract

One thing should be clear from all this sad history: there is no satisfactory solution to the complicated problem of educating children considered by the dominant members of the society so different as to make them incapable of benefitting fully from the sort of education provided to children of the majority. It is not a question of resources only, or of technique, or of the structure of schooling, but more fundamentally of the whole enterprise of “minority education.” Inevitably, such education, even with the best of intentions, is a preparation to occupy (and to internalize) a separate and inferior position. As a result, public schools, which Horace Mann and his allies saw as “the great equalizers of the conditions of men,” have been reproducers and confirmers of inequality for Indian pupils for many decades. Some schools have subtracted rather than added value, and have sent Indian youth out into the world less competent and less capable of learning life’s lessons than they would have been without such schooling.